Notes from a disciplined software developer

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July 2007

While English is the de facto language for technical documentation, it’s a headache when it comes to using the two key words of the free software philosophy: Free and non-free. I mean, to explain what free software is all about, we should also explain what we mean by “free”.

Also, both “non-free” and “proprietary” miss the point, just like open-source does in a similar sense; on one hand, “non-free” means that something is not free (yes, I’m a genius!), so we’re back to the starting point, as we have to explain what we mean by “non-free” (a non-gratis-bear or a non-libre-person?) and “non-free” is not an strong term; on the other hand, “proprietary” means that something has one or more owners, that’s it. We need an strong, offending term.

PS: English already has a word that perfectly defines the contrary of “Free as in Freedom”: Privative. But people may argue that this is the worst solution because “privative” is an unusual word… And that would be a valid point.

I will use it to talk about what’s going on behind-the-scenes with my contributions to the free software movement, mainly by means of GNU/Linux Matters. I want to let people know that we’re alive! That behind those cool but static websites there are people moving forward, getting ready to effectively defend Freedom in computing. Yes, we already have a blog, but I believe that a personal touch would be great as well. I look forward to seeing more people at GLM blogging about what’s happening under the hood.

But that’s not it. I’m studying computing, so you might think that I’ll blog about computing-related stuff; if so, you’re right. I love software and I wish I could only care about it, without worrying about whether it’s free or not… Every single piece of software must be free as in Freedom. Unfortunately, in the real world, most computing systems are powered by privative software.

I hope you enjoy it!

PS: You might wonder what’s “privative software”. I’ll explain it later, but in the mean time you can read dylunio’s brief explanation.

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